do people at the bottom have access to medical advances or are they in lifelong debt in the unfortunate case when they need those medical advances?
Now, if we’re shifting to why advances are often generally available, sure, there are lots of plausible theories that may or may be true, in whole or part, and which we’ll never prove one way or the other. Believe what makes you happy, or angry, or whatever mood you prefer.
But it's not me who is shifting, right? The claim was:
> Science and technology, I feel, has always had a certain apathy towards the plight [of] the people at the bottom rungs.
not
> The claim was that average people don’t benefit from medical advances
My point is to reject the claim that the high availability of vaccines is a counter-example. It's a political decision, not a science/technology related one.
If you’re going to say that fact X is not a counter/example because [subjective, speculative reasons] then I’m confident you’ll never find a fact that contradicts your beliefs. There will always be some “oh, well the bridge collapsed, but it wasn’t bad engineering it was political reasons, so it doesn’t count as a collapse.”
To restate, COVID vaccine can't be used as an example of "science/technology's sympathy towards the bottom rungs". They were only accessible because governments purchased those vaccines from science/technology companies and gave away for free. Companies developed it to make profit.
If the governments didn't purchase billions of doses at a subsidised price, most people wouldn't be able to afford it [1]. I don't see how this conclusion is subjective, speculative, or unfalsifiable?
[1] https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/covid-19-vaccines-what-i...
But generally we’re talking about the life experience of the 330m people who are not outliers in our society.